British: 19th Century

This lengthy analysis of Irish Victorian era literature includes sections on "Gaelic and Classical Literature", "Irish influence on English Literature", "National Folk-ballads and other writings", "Patrick Kennedy", and "Women writers."

Contains: Historical Context, Content Analysis, Bibliography

Author: Alfred Perceval Graves

From:The Cambridge History of English and American Literature Volume XIII: English, The Victorian Age, Part Two,The Nineteenth Century, III

"Recognizing the specific elements of Old Testament prophecy that the Victorian sages drew upon helps define the genre they created, and such definition is a crucial step in understanding this major strain in Anglo-American nonfiction. Indeed, one of the most useful approaches to the Victorian sage begins in the recognition that his writings and those of his modem heirs form a clearly identifiable genre, the definition of which offers readers crucial assistance since genre determines the rules by which one reads, interprets, and experiences individual works of literature."

"Anne Mellor here offers the conceptual framework for a better understanding of the Romantic writers. Her penetrating study yields new interpretations of Byron, Keats, Carlyle, and Coleridge. The Romantics have been seen as expressing a secularized version of a divinely ordered universe. Mellor emphasizes another strain in Romanicism, one linked to the philosophical skepticism and social turbulence of the age: a conception of the universe as random motion, as a fertile chaos that always throws up new forms."

"Articles about British and American authors do exist on the web. You can read good criticism of novels, poetry, plays, online and for free. But there are plenty of sites that are a waste of time, too. Use our guide to find the worthwhile articles and skip the web sites where someone just retyped their favorite poem."

"Nowhere is the Victorian novelists' desire to strengthen resolve more keenly felt than when they deal with early death. [....] This is the point at which the Romantic ideal of the innocent child, and the Evangelical ideal of the saved child as a spiritual guide, reinforce each other. However, the novelists rarely adopt either the visionary modes of Romantic poetry or the saccharine iconography of the tract: the novel form which they inherited offers its own unique opportunities for stressing the value of childhood, and exploring [in a positive way] the last phase of a child character's earthly consciousness."

Contains: Historical Context,

Author: Jacqueline Banerjee

From:Through the Northern Gate: Childhood and Growing Up in British Fiction, 1719-1901 Chapter 4; New York: Peter Lang, 1996

"The Gothic Literature Page is devoted to study of Gothic Literaturewhich flourished in England from 1764 to 1820. This site is intended toprovide students and scholars of the Gothic novel access to the growingnumber of resources available on the web. An introduction to the Gothicnovel, collected summaries, papers, critical and bibliographical information and related sites are assembled together to expedite research."

"Too often the term "Gothic" appears as a catch-all term pitted against or aligned with some aspect of the Romantic, without attention to specific works or to the evolving nature of the genre. Thus, a "who read whatlist" can provide some historical grounding for these investigations. I've begun with the gothic readings of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats and will add others (Mary Shelley and De Quincey are next up) as the list develops."

"The Literary Gothic is a Web site for all things concerned with literary Gothicism, whichincludes ghost stories, "classic" Gothic fiction (1764-1820), and related pre- and post-Gothic and supernaturalist literature prior to the mid-twentieth century. " The "General Resources" category will be the most useful, containing many links to critical sites and essays. Author and title sections list primarily online texts, with some criticism mixed in.

"This study sets out to remedy part of this neglect by examining the development of literary collections during the period when they became a printed genre directed to a diverse readership, from the Restoration to the beginning of the nineteenth century. By analyzing the way these collections shape and are shaped by the cultural contexts in which they were produced and by explicating the kind of reading they invite,this book argues that literary anthologies mediate between individual readers and literary culture. This mediation redefines readers' subjectivity by representing literature as art and reading as a critical activity. Anthologies sell texts of choice and the choice of texts. "

An online community of Jane Austen fans help maintain this website devoted to the author. Contains public domain works on and by Austen as well as a list of links to external resources for more information. Also has an online forum.

This lengthy analysis of English 19th century drama includes sections on "The drama a popular amusement in the nineteenth century ", Richard Lalor Sheil , J. Westland Marston , Dion Boucicault, Douglas Jerrold, and W. S. Gilbert.

Contains: Historical Context, Content Analysis, Bibliography

Author: Harold Child

From:The Cambridge History of English and American Literature Volume XIII: English, The Victorian Age, Part One,The Nineteenth Century, III

"The critical opinion about the Pre-Rapahelites' output was often scathing, often laudatory, but always good reading. I have compiled an index of nearly all (I won't claim this index is definitive--merely very, very close to it) of the magazine and newspaper articles mentioning thePre-Raphaelites between 1849 and 1900."

This site describes itself as "a Website devoted to the study of Lord Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, JohnKeats, their contemporaries and historical contexts. Romantic Circles is the collaborative product of editors, contributors, and users around theworld--a wide community with a shared interest in the literature and culture of the younger Romantics and their ever-widening circles ofinfluence."

"Romanticism On the Net is a Peer-reviewed, Electronic Journal devoted to Romantic studies. This quarterly journal is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography." This journal has the full text of its articles on line.

"The argument of this book is that in late Victorian England a group ofnovelists and essayists quite consciously sought and found ideas inpost-Darwinian biology that were peculiarly susceptible to imaginativetransformation. The period 1860-1900 was a time of great confusion in biology; the natural selection hypothesis was in retreat before its acute critics, and no extension of evolutionary theory to human affairs was too bizarre to attract its quota of enthusiasts. Writers capitalised on this prevailing uncertainty and used it to their own artistic or polemic ends."